


They Go Just as Quickly as They Come

by petpluto



Category: Gilmore Girls
Genre: Does not follow a Year in the Life, Gen, Not Canon Compliant, Richard is still dead though
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-26
Updated: 2017-10-26
Packaged: 2019-01-23 06:56:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,004
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12501448
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/petpluto/pseuds/petpluto
Summary: Richard dies. Emily goes on living.





	They Go Just as Quickly as They Come

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this before A Year in the Life, and never posted it because I was somewhat disillusioned by the Lorelai and Rory storylines. 
> 
> But I really love Emily, so here it is.

The house is empty.

At first, its emptiness wasn’t as pervasive. She accepted the house, and the stillness. 

It hadn’t been so long. Not really. Richard had spent longer away on business trips. The house was empty, but not unfamiliarly so. But there came a time when, if Richard had been away on a business trip, he would have been back from it. And the emptiness pressed in until it is all she can see, all she can feel.

The house is empty.

She doesn’t wander the halls. She doesn’t throw herself at his portrait. She does not have a portrait made. She doesn’t shutter the windows and regress. She doesn’t dress in all black. She isn’t part of some maudlin tale, some piece of fiction Rory and Richard had once fawned over together. She is a graduate of Smith, after all. She still belongs to any number of groups, of charities and clubs and associations. She fills her days, just as she did before.

The house, though, is still empty, when she returns to it.

Heddy had patted her hand the other day, at a fundraiser for Elizabeth Park, and had simperingly whispered, “You miss him.”

She had refrained from issuing the biting comment she longed to spit out, but barely. Heddy’s heart, as feeble as it may now be, is in the right place. It is that she is so very wrong.

She doesn’t miss Richard. Missing Richard would be, well, tolerable. This is even more than the ever present ache she carried during the years of estrangement from Lorelai. This is - She is Emily Gilmore. And she knows how to be Emily Gilmore without Richard. She has her own social circle, her own friends. She has the activities that she has always had, that have brought meaning to her life. She functions, much in the way she always has. But she doesn’t know how to be in a world that doesn’t have him in it.

The house is empty.

Richard’s books have been sent to Rory, or packed away. She donated his clothes in the aftermath of his passing, which had been both so sudden and so easily foretold by the people - the doctors and her daughter - who were willing to accept its inevitability. His humidor has been removed. 

Richard Gilmore is gone, and she still is present, and the house is empty.

She still thinks of all the things to tell him, throughout her day. She doesn’t. She refrains from speaking to him, as if he is still present. As if he can still hear her. She refuses to be that type of person. To live that type of life.

The house is empty, so Emily simply finds other places to spend her time.

She travels Europe. (Alone.)

She visits old friends. (Alone.)

She contemplates buying a condo closer to Stars Hollow, or a small place in Paris, where Rory can visit.

But she cannot part with the house.

~~~

It is Lorelai who makes the house less empty.

Lorelai, who begins coming unannounced, on Tuesdays for lunch and Sundays for drinks. Who brings her grandson in his stroller, the one Richard only briefly got to meet, the one whom Lorelai named William Richard, because she knew, because she listened -

Lorelai, who had fled from the house and from her, slowly works on filling it again.

Emily stops by Lorelai and Luke’s house, the house she found so long ago, when Lorelai and Luke were first engaged, and Lorelai immediately sticks out her tongue at Callie. 

“You don’t want to go with Grandma, right?” she asks, “Grandma is gross.”

“Gross!” Callie agrees.

“Lorelai…” She says, and tries to even out the shrillness in her voice.

“She lets you stay up way past your bedtime and she has that awful pool. Why would you ever want to go with her?” Lorelai continues, ignoring her.

Callie looks at her mother and nods. “Grandma’s stinky.”

“Grandma is stinky,” Lorelai agrees. “She lets you eat all the junk you want. Who does that? Your dad makes you good food, that has vegetables.”

Her granddaughter nods along. And then says, “But if Grandma wants me to come…”

 

“Well,” her daughter tells her daughter, “if Grandma wants you to go, then you’re gonna have to make that sacrifice. You’re going to have to put up with having maids make you cinnamon rolls for breakfast and getting to watch all the Disney Channel you want. But I want you to remember that this is enough to nominate you for martyrdom.”

Callie insists on coming with her. She stays for the week, and they shop for the horrible food Luke won’t let his children eat and gorgeous clothing Lorelai will sigh at, and Callie brightens the halls. Emily brings her in her new dresses to all the functions, proudly introducing her and whispering the appropriate gossip. Callie giggles and sits properly, and eats the food provided without comment. It both lessens and exacerbates the loss of Richard. Richard, who she can all but see discussing all the topics of the day with Callie. Richard, who would listen seriously, who would read to their granddaughter vigorously. Who would be so very happy to have a little girl in the house again. It pings at the ache of her lost years with Lorelai. But Callie brings her own joy. Callie is laughter and cartwheels through the halls, who laughs at her own poorly constructed jokes, and then laughs at Emily’s as well.

Emily hems and haws over Lorelai’s invasion, not because she isn’t thankful but because. The day Lorelai decides to stop, the day Lorelai leaves again, the house will be emptier than it was before.

“Stop waiting for the other shoe to drop, Grandma,” Rory advises, watching Lorelai and Luke introduce Will to the concept of a ‘pool’ with her. She had called ahead, asking if she could stay at the house, because, she said, Stars Hollow was getting a little crowded. The calling ahead is what makes her different from her mother, who still appears unannounced.

Emily knows the lie. Rory delights in the barely controlled chaos of Lorelai’s world, adores her siblings, and breathes in that town like it is what sustains her while she is away. But Rory knows the emptiness of the house, the lack of Richard.

“I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Emily tells her, watching her youngest granddaughter creep closer and closer to her father.

She knows Rory is rolling her eyes, because Rory is Lorelai’s daughter and the rolling of eyes is an activity Lorelai perfected as a teenager. “Of course you don’t. But she’s not going anywhere. They’re not going anywhere.”

She wants to believe it. She wants to interrogate Rory. She wants to feel it in her bones. But instead she just says, “So you say,” and lets it go. 

Rory does as well.

~~~

She and Lorelai fight on a Wednesday. The kind that used to define their relationship but now are as few and far between as they can be.

She is nervous energy, pent up frustration. She calls Lorelai upon finding one of William’s toys stashed under a chair from the previous Sunday.

“You need to do a better job cleaning up after your children, Lorelai,” she says as soon as her daughter picked up the phone. “I could have broken my neck.”

Lorelai snipes back, and they volley back and forth, until Lorelai hangs up on her.

She gets a bottle of wine out of the cellar. Sits in the chair above Will’s toy, and pours herself a glass. She does not cry.

~~~

On Sunday, she pulls out the box of Richard’s cigars. The box she kept and had slipped into her dresser. Smells them. Contemplates lighting one, just to have its scent on the air. Just to be able to live in the fantasy, for a moment.

The doorbell rings, shattering her thoughts. She stuffs the cigars back into the box, and the box back into the drawer. It rings again, and that, more than anything, alerts her to the fact that it is Lorelai. She takes a moment. Brushes her hair back into place. Fixes her necklace. Checks to see if there is redness around her eyes. (There is. She does not have the time to fix it.)

And walks purposefully toward the front door. She barely has time to open it before Lorelai barges in. “What are you doing here?”

Lorelai glares. “It’s Sunday, Mom. I don’t know how you have failed to notice that I’ve been coming over on Sundays.”

“Well,” she starts, irritably, “you had been coming for lunch on Tuesdays, and you failed to do so this Tuesday. I had assumed you had moved on from whatever it is this was.”

“Yeah, of course you thought that.” She sighs, and then walks further into the house.

Emily chases after her. “Wait, where are you going?”

Her daughter finds the drink cart. “I’m going to get myself a drink, and then talk to my mother, like I have been for the past I don’t know how many Sundays.”

She hands Emily a glass and she accepts it, silently. Lorelai takes a gulp of her own. “Tuesday morning, Will fell down the stairs at the house. I spent almost the entire day at the hospital, with him and Luke and Callie, waiting to get him admitted. I didn’t decide to stop coming, Mom. I just - forgot it was Tuesday.”

Emily clutches her glass, visions of her grandson with a cast dancing around her head. “Is William alright?”

Lorelai collapse onto the nearby couch. “He’s fine, which is why I didn’t tell you about it. There was nothing broken. He was just a little bruised.”

She walks over to the couch, perches on the edge. “Lorelai…”

“I spent all day, just on the edge, and when I got home I didn’t even think of anything else except putting him to bed. And then you called and it just.” Lorelai stops. “I didn’t realize why. I’m sorry.”

“Well.” Emily takes a sip of her drink. Pauses. “I did jump to conclusions.”

Lorelai nods. “So, tell me about the girls at the club. How’s Bitty?”

~~~

Lorelai comes back to the house on Tuesday, for lunch. She brings William with her, and Emily coos at him and kisses him all over, listens to him giggle. Revels in his chubby arms hugging her around her neck. She can still see some light bruising.

“You know,” she tells Lorelai with Will on her lap, “I don’t think I ever told you this but when you were four, you leapt off the porch at the Havertons’ Fourth of July party.”

Lorelai stares at her. “What?”

“I don’t know what you were thinking,” she continues. “But we saw you. Richard and I. You had some sort of dish rag on your shoulders and you just ran and jumped. I would swear to you time slowed down. And when you landed, it was in this crumpled heap and I thought, just for a second, that you had gone and killed yourself.”

“What happened?”

Emily takes a bite of salad. “We gathered you up without saying our goodbyes, and waited in a god awful emergency room for hours for a doctor to tell us that you were fine. A little banged up, but otherwise in perfect health.” She pauses. “And then I had to make my apologies to Betty, because you’d landed in what was apparently her favorite flower bed.”

Lorelai laughs, and Emily watches a bit of the tension she has been carrying ease. “I can’t believe you apologized for that.”

“Well,” she says thoughtfully, “I apologized for her flowers, and then berated her on the lack of railings on her porch.”

Her daughter laughs again, and Emily smiles and presses a kiss to her grandson’s brow.

~~~

The house is empty.

The house will always be empty.

But the days when it is less so are the days Emily cherishes.


End file.
